A Method for Content Validation of Community Resilience Indicators

Abstract

Community resilience refers to the concept of a community being able to prepare for, respond to, recover from, and adapt to disruptions in a way that does not compromise long-term community functionality and well-being. Measuring and tracking resilience with an indicator framework is an activity commonly undertaken by communities as they plan and manage actions for improving resilience. Previous NIST research has highlighted that (i) most community resilience indicator frameworks do not provide—either through systematic literature review or structured expert judgment---adequate theoretical grounding for the indicators included in a framework, and (ii) that established methods, such as content validation, can address this gap. However, content validation, which uses expert judgment to determine if a framework includes all relevant and no extraneous indicators, was developed for measuring systems that exhibit less complexity than communities. Consequently, using existing content validity guidelines to develop community resilience indicators is less than ideal. This Special Publication proposes a method to tailor content validation to the specific needs of choosing indicators to measure community resilience, and provides a worked example so that the method can be reproduced by researchers and practitioners.